The present invention relates to a toy building block set comprising several blocks of various kinds.
Toy building block sets with building blocks which may be stuck together are often used by children to assemble simple structures or constructions. These toy building blocks are generally cuboid beam blocks of varying length which may be stuck together by a kind of nap or bristle connection The blocks may be stuck onto a base plate, for example, which supports the structure.
The number of structures which may be constructed with these blocks is limited; furthermore, the appearance of the finished structure often bears only slight resemblance to the original and thus fails to satisfy completely the esthetic sense of the playing child. This is due, among other things, to the following factors.
The known blocks can often be stuck together in only one preferred way, for example, so that no direct connections are possible between two blocks perpendicular to them; these may only be carried out by sticking a further block between them, which conflicts with a true-to-nature appearance.
Furthermore, arch-shaped structures such as gateways for example, can only be approximated by step-shaped right-angled constructions.
Connections at an angle which is not a right angle are generally impossible to carry out at all. Thus, no sloping surfaces such as roofs of houses may be put together with a conventional set of building blocks.
It is true that a great number of special blocks may be obtained for this kind of building block game which allow for connections other than right-angled ones, for example; but these special blocks can generally only be obtained as part of a building set for a specific model, such as a house, to be put together according to a plan, and are not intended to, and often cannot at all, be used for constructing other models or structures. These special blocks can thus only be used to construct the intended model in strict accordance with the predetermined plan, without the child requiring, or being stimulated to use, any imagination of his own.
Furthermore, if one of these special blocks is lost, the whole set is useless.
Ultimately, the child will resort to the normal cuboid blocks and use them to assemble constructions according to his imagination. Due to the above-mentioned limitation of the construction possibilities and the unsatisfying esthetic value of the constructed models, his interest in playing with the blocks will soon diminish.
The same is true of other sets of building blocks.
Adults also play with such building block sets in their free time, although for different reasons than children. For example, they are interested in constructing a certain imagined pattern, trying out possible combinations of block connections or building a structure in the form of a puzzle. Thus the reason why adults play with the blocks is determined more by the intellect than in the case of children. At the same time, adults want to be satisfied esthetically, i.e. they want to obtain a result which is a harmonious, esthetically appealing structure. The incentive to play is of course increased when such structures can be obtained with only a small number of types of blocks, without requiring a number of special blocks. This intellectual incentive with all the possibilities suggested is not provided by known building block sets.
The invention is based on the problem of providing a building block set comprising only a small number of different types of blocks with which a great number of different model structures may be assembled; the assembled model should be able to resemble the natural model as closely as possible, on the one hand, and esthetic design of the model should be possible with the blocks, on the other. This problem is solved according to the invention by the features stated in the claim 1.